Re: protocol support for intercepting proxies

PS, many organisations do have competent IT departments, but they still 
need to justify the cost of things they do.

Going round a bunch of workstations is something that customers are more 
and more reluctant to get their IT staff to do.  They'd rather get them 
to do things that are in their eyes more productive.

It's a recurring theme in comments from customers - we get a lot of 
requests like "if I upgrade will I need to change browser settings or 
any client settings".  That to me signals that it is a concern for 
customers.

Adrien


Adrien de Croy wrote:
>
>
> I'm talking about intercepting proxies, which squid is not.
>
> We do get requests from clients around these sorts of issues.
>
> Many clients (esp SMB) don't have any tech support staff, or their 
> staff are not very knowledgeable.
>
> It's one thing for us to say they should have good staff, it's another 
> for them to find and pay them.
>
> We get many support requests unrelated to WinGate, regarding DNS 
> setup, DHCP setup, proxy auto config etc etc.
>
> Enough support requests to consider it a problem.
>
> For PAC to work properly, you need everything lined up, DNS/DHCP, 
> something to serve the .pac file etc etc.
>
> When it works sure it works.  When it doesn't there are a bunch of 
> places to start looking, and that's where the support cost comes in.
>
> Regards
>
> Adrien
>
>
> Adrian Chadd wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 18, 2007, Adrien de Croy wrote:
>>
>>  
>>> None of this addresses the fact that
>>>
>>> a) intercepting proxies exist, and exist currently unsupported by 
>>> the spec
>>> b) customers want to be able to *enforce* HTTP policy on their 
>>> corporate networks,
>>> c) customers don't like to have to pay sys admins to do things they 
>>> can get around with technology.
>>> d) the more links you put in a chain, the more chance one of them 
>>> will break.
>>>     
>>
>> Explain how you can get around these issues with technology without 
>> having
>> at least a skeletal technical services staff to handle issues?
>>
>> My last client has a 1400 desktop environment running off a single Squid
>> server, using central-managed browser configuration + proxy.pac for the
>> actual service configuration. Works fine for their requirement.
>> They've had no complaints since I updated their Squid environment (since
>> not touching an environment for 5 years does result in degraded 
>> performance;
>> they had no system administrator for their squid stuff which "just 
>> worked"
>> for said 5 years..)
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Adrian
>>
>>   
>

-- 
Adrien de Croy - WinGate Proxy Server - http://www.wingate.com

Received on Monday, 18 June 2007 04:03:11 UTC